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Consegrity® (Consilience Energy Mirrors)

Consegrity is a Bridge to Wellness
that has no counterpart in health care today. It is a non-contact approach
that touches the heart of all aspects of Self: Mind, Body and Spirit. It
supports the ability of the individual to clear, clean, organize and
reorganize electromagnetic, vibrational systems, allowing the body to heal
itself.*

note: This entry was mostly written when Mary Lynch was alive. I've added a couple of notes about her death and have tried to smooth out the writing, but there may be some rough spots. rtc

Consegrity® is a type of faith healing
and energy medicine that was developed by Dr. Mary
A. Lynch, a retired physician who died in 2012,* and Debra Harrison, a
massage therapist who died in
the summer of 2005 while being treated with Consegrity by Dr. Lynch (photo). Harrison
died of untreated diabetes and faith in her own nonsense. Apparently, so did Mary Lynch.

When Harrison's mother advised her to go to a hospital about a year and a
half before her death, "Mary Lynch took her to another room and told her
NEVER to tell Debbie to go to a hospital again," according to Debbie's
nephew, Noa Hawkins. He says:

Mary and Emily [Debra's daughter] have a firm belief
that it was our concern for Debbie that killed her, our negative energy.
They have repeatedly insinuated her death was our fault, because of negative
energy.

After my grandmother's death, my two uncles and my
mother went to see Debbie. Evidently, she was almost anorexic, barely awake,
and drifted in and out of conversation. She refused all of their urgings to
go to a hospital. That was the last time they saw her. (personal
correspondence)

Debra Harrison's mother also became a student of
Consegrity and despite showing signs of severe illness (great pain and
jaundice) was advised against seeking medical attention by her daughter. Her
mother eventually became so ill that she agreed to see a doctor in mid-May
2005. According to Chris Ducey, Harrison's brother:

The doctor took one look at her, admitted her into the
hospital, did tests, CAT scans, MRI's, ultrasounds, and a biopsy. Results
showed that she had a cancerous tumor the size of a grapefruit on her liver
(obstructing her bile duct, hence her jaundice) and a cancerous tumor on her
kidney. Both were inoperable due to being at an advanced stage. Debra was
furious with all of us, stating that mom was "not sick," just detoxifying, and
that the reason she was sick was because of our "negative energy" (read
love and concern). [Debra said] that taking her to the doctor and having
tests done put a "label" on what was wrong (although she maintained nothing
was wrong) and the cancer manifested itself with the diagnosis. Hence, we
caused the cancer.

She went on to say that she had been aware of the
growth on mom's liver for many months, that it was "inactive cancer"
(whatever that is) and that it never was cancer, and that she had "checked
in" with mom and had cured her cancer.

Mary [Lynch] told mom that all of us were toxic and
that we should all leave because we were killing her. We stayed with mom
constantly up until she died on June 19th, 2005. (personal correspondence)

Such is the logic of those trying to rationalize the
obvious failure of a magical therapy. Debra was in Europe when her mother
died. According to Chris Ducey: "Mom and Debra were not the only ones to die
while under the care of Consegrity. Obviously these people might have died
anyway (everyone does eventually) or maybe seeking medical treatment would
have helped them as it would have in Debra's case."

A few weeks after their mother's death, Chris saw
Debra alive for the last time.

When we did see Debra on July 9th, she was so ill I didn't recognize her.
And in my professional opinion, being a firefighter and EMT for the last
sixteen years, I would have classified her as "extremely sick" (meaning she
needed medical attention) and given her a ride to the hospital emergency
room.

She went back to Kansas, was there for about two weeks, then went on a
road trip with Mary for three weeks. They traveled from Kansas to New York,
to Vancouver, Canada, to San Francisco then back to Kansas. She got back
home on August 20th and died two days later on August 22nd.

According to Noa Hawkins, the coroner's report
states that
Harrison died of complications from untreated diabetes (personal
correspondence).
Chris Ducey says: "She died of diabetic
ketoacidosis secondary to undiagnosed diabetes mellitus. The autopsy
stated that the islets of Längerhans in her pancreas had atrophied"
(personal correspondence).

What is this wonderful therapy, you might ask, that
could not heal its founder or her mother? "Consegrity does nothing....it supports reflecting
back to the client so they can clear, clean, organize, and reorganize who
they are."*
Like many "alternative" therapies, Consegrity allegedly does nothing itself;
it supposedly makes it possible for the body to heal itself.

Here is what Harrison and Lynch were promising the
world
before their deaths:

Observing what works and what does not Consegrity
emerged revealing what's possible in the human body's ability to heal. When
the balance of the interactive energy fields around every system is
disrupted, the human body adapts, overloads and breaks down.

Consegrity works with the electromagnetic, vibrational
systems of the body by reflecting/mirroring in a way that supports
neutralizing the disruption, thereby grounding the overload along fluid
dynamics restoring balance at the level of the cause bridging management of
healthcare and supporting optimum, viable health.

In simpler terms this Wellness Support Program has
been found to enable an individual to step into Awareness, thereby
increasing the ability of the body to shift state... Shift State...What is
That? A feeling state that either supports you and your physical body... or
not.

Question.... How do you choose to feel?

Consegrity Wellness Support Program can be taught to
anyone and requires only that you are willing to expand your perspective of
What is Possible.

According to the
now-defunct Consegrity website, Consegrity is a word that "encapsulates" CONsciousness awareness; tenSEGRITY
of the body — the ability to withstand tension and pressure; and CONsilience
— "the ALL KNOWING aspect of us." They had a very lofty mission:

We choose to create an opportunity to provide
personal growth, performance and expansion of awareness that we are all
ONE. By observing what works and letting go of that which no longer serves
us, we can, each and everyone, bring Order to Chaos, Unity to
Mind/Body/Spirit and awaken to a planet reborn through remembering Who We
Really Are.

Lofty indeed. Saving the planet, providing personal
growth while making us aware that all is one. What they claim to have found by observation is that
what works is believing that our trillions of cells will repair and rebuild
themselves forever "if the environment around the cell stays clean and
clear."

However, as we live life, our cells are exposed to
physical, emotional, spiritual, inherited and/or
environmental trauma. Between the two cells [see picture to the right],
you can see the energy of accumulative trauma represented by the dots.
When this energy satiates the cell to a certain point, communication is
lost, tension builds and the cell undergoes a loss of
tensegrity (the
ability to balance tension and compression)....If the accumulative energy
in the connective tissue is removed, the cell reverts to normal, the DNA
unlocks and healing occurs. Clearing this extraneous energy is what
Consegrity supports.*

Even if this were true, removing this extraneous energy
can't be done by micro-liposuction or any other mechanical or chemical means.
Consegrity claims that it uses consciousness at
the DNA level to "clear extraneous energy." However, you can't clean up this
energy debris by yourself. You need a trained expert in mirroring energy to
do that for you. The healer allegedly feels the energy or "wisdom" of the
patient's response at the cellular level and somehow mirrors this wisdom
back to the body which rids itself of "extraneous energy," or some such
thing.

Lynch and Harrison called their creation a "Bridge to
Wellness" and claimed:

If the founder of a quack therapy claims it is an
effective treatment for diabetes and then dies of diabetes while being
treated by her co-inventor of the
quackery, one would think that that would be the end of the quackery.
One might think that, however, only if one does not understand how far some
people imbued with magical
thinking will go to defeat
cognitive dissonance and avoid admitting that they're deluded.

Dr. Lynch couldn't help Debra Harrison clear her
extraneous energy, even though she was at her partner's side when she died.
Presumably, Lynch and Harrison provided the best healing energy that
Consegrity can give, but were unable to assist Harrison with lowering her
blood sugar below 900 mg/dl, which is what it measured at her death. Below
110 mg/dl is considered normal.

As noted above, Mary Lynch did not admit that Consegrity failed. She blamed the negative energy of Harrison's family, those who
loved her enough to try to get her to check into a hospital where she might
have received proper treatment. This negative energy supposedly interfered with the
healing. What negative energy is or how it might work was not discussed by
Dr. Lynch.

Lynch was a graduate of Georgetown University Medical
School. She specialized in orthopedic surgery and sports medicine before retiring
in 2003. The Consegrity website (now shut down) claimed that "Consegrity also can increase
Performance Potential in all Sports-Related fields."*
It also claimed that
Consegrity® works with animals and "is very beneficial in restoring
balance to their health and reducing your veterinarian bills."*

Lynch became interested in energy medicine while on a quest after the death of
a previous partner in a plane crash. She had been doing sports medicine for 15
years and was tired of dealing with symptoms. She wanted to "correct the
underlying problems."*
She studied the work of Dr.
Harold Saxton Burr, whose
Blueprint for Immortality is considered by some to be the
foundational work for modern energy medicine.She was also influenced
by Semyon Kirlian and
Masaru Emoto. What
did she learn?

When all is said and done, The [energy] field is all
of it. We're a field that contains a body-mind. And when the field slows its
vibration, it literally becomes our cellular tissues. But it's all energy
and space, and mostly space. And that space is our unmanifested potential.
It is all that we could be if we were not what we are. We are the result of
our inherited patterns. And we know that we operate on less than 40% of our
DNA right now, because the rest of it is stuck. You clear your DNA, and
you're actually clearing your father's DNA and your son's DNA. So your gift
you give others as that DNA opens up, is immense.*

In short, Lynch abandoned scientific medicine for a
scientific-sounding form of mystical gibberish. What could it possibly mean
to "operate on less that 40% of our DNA because the rest of it is stuck"? Maybe
Toby Alexander
knows.

As strange as the views of Lynch and Harrison are, it
is hard to imagine anyone with stranger notions about health and disease
than their mentor, John E. Upledger. He thinks he communes with something he calls the patient's
"Inner Physician" and gets vital information from a magical friend:

By connecting deeply with a patient while doing
CranioSacral Therapy, it was possible in most cases to solicit contact with
the patient's Inner Physician. It also became clear that the Inner Physician
could take any form the patient could imagine—an image, a voice or a
feeling. Usually once the image of the Inner Physician appeared, it was
ready to dialog with me and answer questions about the underlying causes of
the patient's health problems and what can be done to resolve them. It also
became clear that when the conversation with the Inner Physician was
authentic, the craniosacral system went into a holding pattern
(pp. 48-49).*

With such a mentor guiding her is it that hard to
understand why Harrison would be attracted to an endless array of
"alternative" therapies and imagine herself walking on the bridge to
wellness?

The Consegrity website may have been shut down, but Dr.
Lynch continued to sell the same snake oil under a different name:
Consilience Energy Mirrors (CEM),
where she proudly proclaimed that The Dream Continues
when she set up her new shop and had her website redesigned. Chris Ducey, executor and trustee to the estate of Debra Harrison, claims
that Consegrity, Inc. was shut down as a business decision. The company was
in deep debt and could not afford to continue operating.*
Mary Lynch blamed the family of Debra Harrison for shutting down Consegrity Inc.:
"Their goal is to stop the process of Consegrity moving forward," she said*
Lynch wrote:

As we have moved forward with the precession of the
equinox, our willingness and ability to listen to the 'consilience' of the
client's quantum field requires that we move to this more precise paradigm.
And though I have the utmost respect for the tool 'Consegrity' and will use
the name in reference and with respect I have chosen to embrace 'Energy
Mirrors', as Consegrity held hostage can no longer serve me.

I do not claim to fully understand that previous
passage, as it seems to have issued from a mind that has left terra firma, but I do understand that Lynch considered the word 'Consegrity' to have been taken hostage by
the following notice on the Consegrity website:

The use of the Consegrity, Inc. name, logo, or
curriculum, for purposes of representing "Consegrity, Inc." without express
written permission from the Executor and Trustee of the Estate of Debra L.
Harrison, is prohibited. Anyone in violation of this prohibition will be
prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.*

Noa Hawkins sees things differently from Mary Lynch:

Before Debbie's death, Mary signed the farm (and
everything) over to her. This was actually rather smart since there were
some enormous debts that Mary would have inherited after Debbie's death, but
managed to avoid. The company also had some extreme debt.

Such a move might also relieve Dr. Lynch of
responsibility for any lawsuits that might be made against the company she
and Harrison had formed. The "farm" was a real farm and office
building in Wichita, Kansas, and a company called Energy Medicine
Training Center, Inc., which owned the registered trademark for Consegrity.
Dr. Lynch not only showed amazing foresight by signing over the company to
Debra before her death, she was amazingly lucky as well. Debra Harrison had
a $500,000 life insurance policy that named Mary Lynch as the beneficiary (Noa
Hawkins and Chris Ducey, personal correspondence).

Mary Lynch may have been sincere in her belief that the cause
of death of her Consegrity co-founder was the negative energy of those
family members who loved Debra Harrison and tried to get her to go to a
hospital. That belief is patently absurd, but Dr. Lynch may have sincerely
believed it. To those who ask
"What's the harm in believing absurd things?" I say consider the folly
of Debra Harrison and Mary Lynch. Diabetes is a treatable disease; so is a toe infection.

Dr. Lynch's last FAQ described such things as what
it's like to undergo this fabulous treatment:

If you are with the therapist during the session,
you will remain fully clothed and just lie down quietly (and probably fall
asleep), while the therapist mirrors your field so your field can clear
extraneous energy. There is no difference in results between a distance
session and a local session. A key component of success is your ability to
communicate with the therapist about what is working and changing.*

Apparently, you have to be a lot better at
communicating what is working than the co-founders of this magic, but at
least you can get a good nap out of the session. And you can have the
practitioner work her magic from thousands of miles away, as there is
absolutely no difference in results between a session where the practitioner
and patient are together and one where they are working at a distance from
each other. This is probably the truest thing one can say about this
quackery.

Is there any scientific basis for this therapy? According to the Consilience Energy Mirrors website FAQ:

Looking at Einstein’s theory that matter is energy, we provide a new
paradigm that moves away from the medical model. The biological system
that we call the physical body is made up of interactive energy fields
that surround every cell and every system, which balance and support
optimal health. When this balance is disrupted, the body adapts,
overloads, and breaks down. This wellness program restores that balance
and supports all biological systems.*

In other words, this promise is the same one repeated
in numerous New Age energy healing scams: illness is due to some sort of
vital energy that is not balanced or not in harmony or
some such thing. The therapy somehow identifies where the energy trouble is
and restores it to where it should be. In this case it is "extraneous
energy" that needs to be cleared out. That's the metaphysical gibberish, but how does it really work? It works,
in part, by the so-called
placebo effect. Traditional healers have known
for millennia that if you can relax people or get them to believe you have
the power to heal, they become suggestible and you
can relieve their stress, ease their minds, and allow their bodies to heal
themselves. In any case, most folks recover on their own from most illnesses and injuries. Why not take the credit? Bob Park explains very simply and clearly how the so-called placebo effect
works for healers:

Once we are convinced of the healing power of a
doctor or a treatment, something very remarkable happens: a sham treatment
induces real biological improvement. This is the placebo effect. Healers
have relied on the placebo effect for thousands of years, but until
recently, it was usually referred to as the "mysterious" placebo effect.
Scientists, however, are beginning to understand the complex interaction
of the brain and the endocrine system that gives rise to the placebo
effect.

People seek out a doctor when they experience
discomfort or when they believe that something about their body is not
right. That is, they suffer pain and fear. The response of the brain to
pain and fear, however, is not to mobilize the body's healing mechanisms
but to prepare it to meet some external threat. It's an evolutionary
adaptation that assigns the highest priority to preventing additional
injury. Stress hormones released into the bloodstream increase
respiration, blood pressure, and heart rate. These changes may actually
impede recovery. The brain is preparing the body for action; recovery must
wait.

The first objective of a good physician, therefore,
is to relieve stress. That usually involves assuring patients that there
is an effective treatment for their condition and that the prospects for
recovery are excellent—if they will just follow the doctor's instructions.
Since we recover from most of the things that afflict us, the brain learns
to associate recovery with visits to the doctor. Most of us start to feel
better before we even leave the doctor's office. (Park 2001: 50-51)

Even the reduction of stress can't cure
diabetes or cancer, but Consegrity, like all forms of faith healing, is
still going to be successful very often. When it isn't, the failures are easily
dismissed as due either to seeking the treatment too late or not having
enough faith in the process or to the negative energy of others. Faith healing succeeds most of the time because
most illnesses resolve themselves on their own. Most people would get better
if they received no treatment at all (Hines 2003; Nickell 1998). Faith
healing can even provide some dramatic moments that appear to be miracles
because patients want the healing to succeed and their bodies can deceive
them into thinking they've been cured when what they are experiencing is a
temporary relief due to such things as the subjective nature of pain and the
actual release of endorphins. Rarely are the alleged dramatic cures followed up, but
when they are the "miracle" dissolves. (See Hines 2003, Nickell
1998, and Randi
1989 for many examples. Here's one from Nickell: A woman who throws off her back brace and claims her
cancer is gone but she dies two months later after X-rays show that a
"cancer-weakened vertebra had collapsed due to the strain placed on it
during the demonstration" at a Kathryn Kuhlman "healing" [p.
135]. Here's another from Nickell: a child is given a year to live by
doctors but a trip to Lourdes convinces his family he's been cured by the
miraculous waters. He dies a year later of his leukemia without much hoopla
[p. 151].)

Ailments that go away on their own
after treatment by a faith healer are credited to the healer. Some
people have been misdiagnosed and don't
really have anything seriously wrong with them to begin with. The
majority of successful faith healings, however, are probably due to the
cooperation of the healer and the patient. Working together, believing in the
treatment, strongly desiring the treatment to work, can not only relieve
stress and bring about the curative effects of the power of suggestion, but
also
can lead the patient to give testimony that is exaggerated or even false in
the desire to get well and to please the healer. The power of
subjective validation is enormous
and essential to many, if not most, faith healings.

In short, faith healers like Mary Lynch can't lose.
They could use just about any treatment they like and probably get about a
75% approval rating even if they are without any knowledge or skill. Most of
their patients will validate their treatments and there will be no follow-up
so there will be few bothersome failures. They are likely to be showered
daily with proclamations of gratitude and are thus led to believe in the
efficacy of their healing power. Emil
Freireich, M.D. goes further. He says, as long as a treatment is
harmless to either a sick or well person, it "will always prove to be
effective for virtually every patient with any serious disease" (emphasis
added; quoted in Randi 1989: 9). If the treatment fails, there are the
standard rationalizations mentioned above.

If, after reading this tale of death by faith, you still want to be a practitioner
of this energy medicine that didn't even work for its co-creators, you can take a
six-day basic course in energy mirroring for $1,500 (prices may vary). After finishing the basic course, you can take one of the advanced two-day
specialty classes (Behavioral, Immune/Cancer, Circulatory, Musculoskeletal)
for $600 each. Prices may change, of course. Given her track record with herself and her partner, this
does not seem like such a bargain to me. Others disagree. One enthusiastic believer,
Virginia Leslie, writes:

Dr. Mary Lynch and Deborah [sic] Harrison have created
a model that pulls together vast sources of knowledge and call it Consegrity®
Wellness. This energy medicine listens to Spirit and helps it shift
acknowledging cause, releasing trapped energy, self-repairing the energetic
grid, and neutralizing the charges that attracted trauma. Then you can
renew. It takes varying amounts of time to reconnect dormant neural
synapses, develop new chemical interactions, repair and create new cells,
alter DNA, patch up holes in the grid, the things our Higher Consciousness
has the innate ability to do!

Consegrity® uses your own Consciousness to
heal, keeping the process clearer. It goes beyond clearing energy blocks to
neutralizing the charge that magnetically pulled in the blocks, thereby
avoiding recurrence. What is truly unique about this modality is that you
don't give away your healing power toanyone.*

It sounds good in theory, if gibberish is what you seek.
Many otherwise intelligent people are often attracted to such
gibberish. We are prone to
wishful thinking, "a willingness to endorse comforting beliefs and to
accept, uncritically, information that reinforces our core attitudes and
self-esteem" (Beyerstein 1999).
We often see patterns that aren't really there and find significance in
coincidental occurrences.
Perception and memory are selective and often used to reinforce biases. We
will find confirmation for our magical beliefs come hell or high water! Many
people are searching for some way to be healthy without having to involve
hospitals, physicians, surgery, or drugs. This is understandable. Not only
is it possible that all the medical knowledge and skill in the world may be
to no avail in your particular case, there is the possibility, however
remote, that a medical mistake might be made. Rather than being cured, you
might be harmed by malpractice or the unforeseen consequences of an
infection or side-effects of a drug. Some people would rather risk
everything on a swell-sounding bit of hopeful gibberish than expose
themselves to the world of hospitals and physicians. The latter symbolize
sickness and they believe by choosing the "alternative" path they are
choosing wellness. There will always be a receptive audience for the faith
healer.

Mary Lynch had a number of followers, including Debra
Harrison's daughter, Emily. There are well over
100 certified Consegritists in the U.S. There are probably just as many
CEM practitioners. It is unknown how many of them advise their clients to
avoid medical doctors and, as a result of this unhealthy advice, how many
early deaths they have contributed to.

*note I received the following, but cannot verify its accuracy. Anyone with information on Mary Lynch's death can contact me via the feedback page for the SD: "I was told by a friend of hers that she had a toe infection that she tried to 'treat' with Consegrity/EnergyMirrors, refused medical attention and antibiotics, then had surgery to amputate the toe, refused antibiotics again, left the hospital and died at home from septic shock."